On an antiquarian jaunt around the Middle East in the 1830s, the Honourable Robert Curzon paid a visit to the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Curzon was dismayed to find that his introductory letter did not elicit the reaction he expected. ‘Archbishop of what?’, said the Patriarch. ‘Canterbury’, said I. ‘Ah! yes! and who is he?’, uttered the venerable cleric. Naturally, Curzon ascribed the Patriarch's ‘ignorance’ to the debased state of the Greek Church under Ottoman rule, but as is all too clear to modern readers, the joke was really on him. The Church of England remained small, with patchy coverage even in the British Isles, a handful of colonial footholds and a limited presence in North America. But by the end of the period covered in this volume, the map of the world was painted pink. Alongside territorial, economic and cultural expansion came the growth of a global Communion, and with it the beginnings of the development of Anglicanism as something more than just the Church of the English. Rowan Strong's volume occupies, then, a pivotal position in the Oxford History of Anglicanism, acting as the mid-point and bridge between volumes on the early modern foundations of the Church of England and its long eighteenth-century elaboration, largely in the British Isles, and those dealing with the global ‘West’ and ‘the rest’ in the twentieth century.

In some senses the story it tells is quite conventional. The opening chronological book-end is a dead giveaway: the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and Catholic Emancipation in 1829 signal the beginning of an era of religious pluralism, but also locate the centre of Anglican political and religious activity firmly in the metropole. Church parties loom large: Andrew Atherstone writes astutely of the insecurities of Evangelicals even at the height of their mid-Victorian strength, while Mark Chapman's all-too-brief survey of Liberal Anglicanism – more a ‘disposition’ than a party, as he observes – is a model of nuance and compression. Robert M. Andrews ably demonstrates the vibrancy of older traditions of High Church Anglicanism: one reason why the ‘new intellectual and spiritual atmosphere’ lovingly evoked by James Pereiro in his chapter on the Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholicism was not to all tastes. A more iconoclastic editor might have opted for a periodisation that did more to scotch sniffy Victorian mythmaking, not least Tractarian notions of the ‘restoration’ of ‘authentic Anglicanism’, which are still widely believed in the present-day Church of England, and whose faint whiff still hangs, incense-like, over parts of the volume. Given how many times Bishop Selwyn is hailed by different contributors as the apostle of something that pretended to be old but was in fact very new – independent, clerically-dominated, globally-minded Anglicanism – it might have made sense to begin in the 1840s instead. Equally, the mushrooming of new large-scale philanthropy, the beginnings of diocesan reform in the 1790s or 1800s and the numerical dominance and popularity of ‘old-fashioned’ High Churchmanship would justify an earlier jumping-off point. These are, though, cavils: any such project necessarily reflects the consensus of current scholarship.

More important is the way in which Strong and his contributors decisively alter the shape and emphasis of received narratives, and for the better. For in placing Church-State questions and partisan conflict against a global backdrop, this volume should drive the final nail into the coffin of characterisations of the nineteenth-century Church as defensive and declining. The opening survey chapters emphasise repeatedly how pressure from tolerationist governments at home and aboard provided imperatives for assertive Anglican reinvention. Strongest of all these imperatives was a growing independence from state support, which, as Jay Brown shows, sparked a boom in voluntary funding and a revolution in church self-government, allowing Anglicans the freedom to compete, innovate and expand in a variety of settings overseas. John Wolffe's excellent conspectus of British and European Anglicanism portrays an institution bent less on survival than on adaptation and growth, outlining its impressive comebacks in industrialising England, its development into a tough-minded minority denomination in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and the churches and chaplaincies that sprang up as far afield as Archangel, Geneva and Biarritz. Carol Engelhardt Herringer's coyly titled chapter on Anglicanism ‘beyond the British Empire’, i.e. in the United States, serves as a reminder of the growing importance of American Episcopalianism. Racked by debates about race and slavery, as well as partisan strife paralleling that in England, it was also similarly go-getting, albeit largely in different spheres: China, Japan, Korea, Latin America and Liberia. Brian Stanley's superb chapter on missions emphasises not just the scale of that endeavour but its effects on the Church at home, suggesting that the reconciliation of voluntaristic energy with episcopal discipline funnelled Evangelicals and High Churchmen alike towards similar organisational models, in the process laying the foundations for Anglican participation in twentieth-century global ecumenism. There follows a succession of chapters on discrete regions – North America and the Caribbean; Sub-Saharan Africa; the Middle East; India; China and East Asia; Australia; New Zealand and the South Pacific; and Latin America – all of them interesting and all by leaders in their areas. Jane Garnett's essay on social and economic thought and Diarmid Finnegan's on science and the Bible both fascinatingly place colonial developments and thinkers at the centre of ostensibly domestic debates.

This is, then, a globetrotting volume that contains plenty to interest and intrigue. Readers will be struck by the ambition of its protagonists, not least among them the CMS, whose ‘mini-empire’ in around 1906 included 975 missionaries, 8,850 native agents, 37 colleges, 92 boarding schools, 12 industrial institutions, 2,400 elementary schools, 40 hospitals, 17 presses and publishing offices and much more besides (p. 122). Nevertheless, despite its unequalled breadth of perspective, this remains in some respects an old-fashioned history. It excels in mapping organisations and parties, but – with some exceptions – the analysis tends to be at the level of the institution: the view from Lambeth Palace or a missionary society boardroom. It would be intriguing to learn more about the family or community piety of new-minted global Anglicans, say, or the culture and worship that united and divided them. Women's organisations and work (Susan Mumm), art and architecture (Ayla Lepine) and music (Jeremy Dibble) all receive attention here from highly regarded scholars, but it is unfortunate that these chapters have so little to say about how the vectors of Anglicanism – Hymns Ancient and Modern or gothic church furniture or the Mothers’ Union – fared overseas. In a sense this makes the argument for the sort of global roadmap that this volume offers, but there is clearly more work to be done. While it is churlish to pick gaps, it is also surprising to read so little about how Anglicans shaped elementary and higher education around the world, or about ministerial/theological training: another area of dramatic change. The joining sinews of the Anglican world – print, para-ecclesiastical spin-off institutions and moral causes – all warrant more sustained attention. In charting the shift from Church of England to Anglican Communion, then, this book ought also to pave the way for and provoke further research into the key question of this series: what is (or was) an Anglican?